SmartConnect

I’ve installed quite a few new Isilon clusters in 2019. All of them are generation 6 clusters (H400, H500, A200), using the very cool 4-nodes-in-a-chassis hardware. Commonality among all these systems is an 1GbE management port next to the two 10GbE ports. While Isilon uses in-band management, we typically use those UTP ports for management: SRS, HTTP, etc. We assign those interfaces to subnet0:pool0 and make it a static SmartConnect pool. This assigns one IP address to each interface; if you do it right, these should be sequential.

Recent addition to my install procedure is to create some DNS A-records for those management ports. This makes it a bit more human friendly to connect your browser or SSH client to a specific node. In line with the Isilon naming convention, I followed the -# suffix format. So if the cluster is called cluster01, node 1 is cluster01-1, node 2 is cluster01-2, etc. However, it turns out this messes up your SyncIQ replication behavior!

Last month I’ve performed a Isilon tech refresh of two clusters running NL400 nodes. In both clusters, the old NL400 36TB nodes were replaced with 72TB NL410 nodes with some SSD capacity. First step in the whole process was the replacement of the Infiniband switches. Since the clusters were fairly old, an OneFS upgrade was also on the list, before the cluster could recognize the NL410 nodes. Dell EMC has extensive documentation on the whole OneFS upgrade process: check the support website, because there’s a lot of version dependencies. Finally, everything was prepared and I could begin with the actual Isilon tech refresh: getting the new Isilon nodes up and running, moving the data and removing the old nodes.

Isilon scale-out NAS systems lean heavily on DNS. DNS plays a vital role in the way the clients access the files on the Isilon cluster: clients are distributed across nodes and network interfaces based on what your DNS reports back to the clients. This is all done by the SmartConnect component in the Isilon which is configurable up to a certain extent. In this post I’ll explain what SmartConnect does and will also share a tip to speed up your Isilon DR procedure.